# Scanned PDF Summarizer (OCR)

Scanned contracts, photographed letters, old reports printed and rescanned — these PDFs have no text to copy, so most summarizers return nothing. Here, pages without a text layer go through OCR automatically before the summary is written.

## Key facts

- OCR runs automatically when a page has no text layer — nothing to configure.
- Best accuracy for English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese scans.
- The free tool reads up to 40 scanned pages with OCR (300 pages for PDFs with a text layer).
- Then you can summarize, extract key points, ask questions or download the recognised text.
- Clean, straight scans at 200-300 dpi give the best results.

## Why scanned PDFs are different

A PDF is a container. Some PDFs contain real text (letters you can select and copy); others contain only images of pages — what a scanner or a phone app produces. For an image-only page, a summarizer that just reads the text layer sees an empty document.

When you upload a PDF here, the tool first checks how much readable text each document has. If the text layer is missing or too poor, it runs **optical character recognition (OCR)** on the pages, then summarizes the recognised text. The result panel shows an **OCR** badge so you know which path was used.

## How to summarize a scanned PDF

1. **Upload the scan** — Any PDF from a scanner, a multifunction printer or a phone scanning app.
2. **Wait a few extra seconds** — OCR takes longer than reading a text layer: count roughly 2-4 seconds per page.
3. **Choose what you need** — Summary, key points, questions, or Extract text to get the recognised text as a .txt file.
4. **Check names, dates and figures** — OCR can confuse similar characters (0/O, 1/l, 5/S), especially on low-quality scans.

## Getting good OCR results

- **Resolution:** 200-300 dpi is ideal. Below 150 dpi, small print becomes unreliable.
- **Straight pages:** skewed or curved pages (book spines) reduce accuracy.
- **Contrast:** black text on white paper works best; faded thermal paper and coloured backgrounds are hard.
- **Handwriting** is generally not recognised reliably.
- **Mixed PDFs** are fine: if most pages have text, the text layer is used.

> **Have a paper document scanned?** — Upload it — OCR and summary happen in one step.

## Common scanned documents people summarize

- Signed paper contracts and leases.
- Letters from administrations, banks and insurers.
- Old reports, theses and archives digitised from paper.
- Medical or school records received as scans (check them carefully).
- Book chapters scanned for a course.

## FAQ

### How do I know if my PDF is scanned?

Open it and try to select a word. If you can't select text, or the selection covers the whole page like an image, the PDF is scanned. The tool detects this automatically anyway.

### Why only 40 pages with OCR?

OCR is computationally expensive. To keep the free tool fast for everyone, scanned PDFs are OCR'd up to their first 40 pages. Documents with a text layer can be up to 300 pages.

### Which languages does the OCR recognise?

English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are recognised best. Other Latin-alphabet languages often work with more errors; non-Latin scripts in scanned images are not reliably recognised yet.

### Can I just get the recognised text?

Yes. Use the Extract text tab and download the text as a .txt file, page by page.

### Is a photo of a document OK?

Phone scanner apps that produce a flattened, cropped PDF work well. A raw photo saved as PDF works if the page is flat, sharp and well lit.

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Source: https://pdf-summarize.com/tools/summarize-scanned-pdf — PDF Summarizer (free PDF summarizer, Q&A with page citations, OCR, REST API). Site overview: https://pdf-summarize.com/llms.txt